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Comment by jterrys | Hacker News Reader

This actually begs the question...why the fuck would they use THESE for an airshow? They're aesthetically identical to F18 from a ground silhouette perspective. They blew through some really expensive planes from a much smaller fleet for a pony show that any regular F18 could've been part of.

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They do training all day every day in these planes. Air shows are probably less exciting than the stuff they practice to do. Also, while they a generically '18's' they are EA-18g's and possibly have enough differences to require maintaining a separate NATOPs check from the other variants. (never flown one so I don't actually know though :). Either way, other than the blue angles who can't be everywhere and don't represent the diversity of platforms out in the fleet, there really aren't dedicated airshow aircraft out there.

> Air shows are probably less exciting than the stuff they practice to do.

Well, except for this time.

> blue angles

Top-performing trig team with tangent flight that (hopefully) never intersects.

The Air Force has their own demonstration team named The Thunderbirds.

These were locally stationed, just over the border in Washington. The Blue Angels are in Florida today.

Yah.. but between the Iran war and this, we've taken some EW losses. And it's not like this is one of the capabilities that we have massively overprovisioned.

The Blue Angels are the Navy's demonstration team. This accident happened at an airshow on an Air Force base. The Air Force's demonstration team is named The Thunderbirds.

I know. The question was about F18s, which the thunderbirds do not fly.

Yea, that was my thought too. I can’t think of any reason you would reach for those two planes to assign to an airshow. And even if you did, why would you have two? And why would you have them flying anywhere near each other?

> This actually begs the question

I beleive that raises the question. I don't think it begs the question at all.

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